Evan Heggie;
The Beatles, rock and roll, records!
2023-11-05 15:29:00
The Beatles took the stage at the Prince of Wales Theater in London on November 4, 1963, in the presence of members of the royal family. You could say it was the culmination of a busy year, with the Liverpool quartet appearing 35 times on various TV shows and playing 287 concerts.
A year ago, the quartet was barely known, but the band’s second single, Please Please Me, released in January, topped the Melody Maker and New Musical Express charts, followed by From Me to You in April and She Loves in August. . The latter was the best-selling single in the UK until 1977 when Mull of Kintyre was released by Paul McCartney. The Beatles’ debut album, Please Please Me, recorded in one day in February 1963 and released in March, remained at number one on the LP chart for 30 weeks. (The With a Beatles LP, released in November 1963, spent nine fewer weeks at the top, but 21 could still be considered a winning number in this case.)
Ordinary men suddenly became stars. “Everything around us has changed,” said George Harrison, then 20. We no longer have a private life, we are now public property.” “We can’t play From Me to You until we’re 40, for example, so John and I will sit down and write more songs,” McCartney, 21, said.
Exactly sixty years ago today, Harrison, Lennon, McCartney, and Ringo Starr performed four songs backstage at the Prince of Wales: From Me to Yout, She Loves Yout, Till There Was Yout, and Twist and Shoutot. Although the night featured a range of performers — from Burt Bacharach to Marlene Dietrich, Susan Maughan to Tommy Steele — it was the Beatles who stole the show. Orally too.
But of course the music and its influence was the important point. As a result, the Daily Mirror’s headline the next day (“Yes, yes, yes!”) read in the same way as the army of fans occupying the concert halls and their surroundings roared, or like the narrative published a few weeks earlier. After the Beatles concert in Cheltenham, which was also on the front page: “Beatlemania!”
The royal variety show was broadcast on television on 10 November, and was the most watched broadcast in the history of British television up to that time: the program was watched by 21.2 million viewers. Within days of broadcast, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” rose to the top of the charts, and in the United Kingdom the young musical generation was given a name: The Beatles.
The invasion did not extend only to Great Britain. Eight days before Prince of Wales, on the band’s first overseas tour – in Sweden – a girl from Stockholm ran on stage to hug Harrison during a performance. He put his arms around the beloved George from behind, who had not lost his voice, and continued to push the vocals with McCartney. In fact, the group had already been heard abroad after a Chicago radio disc jockey recorded the Beatles’ song Please Please Me for the first time in America in February 1963. Fourteen months later, the top five on the chart were songs by the Fab Four in United State.
I would just like to note that in the famous film Dirty Dancing, released in 1987 and filmed in the United States, America of 1963 was remembered in such a way that the atmosphere of the Kellerman Mountain Hotel, built in Pembroke, Virginia, surprisingly resembled a local Union Referral Resort, Although we thought it was two worlds. It was the same in size and equipment, but the traditional bed and music of the getting to know you party and the farewell party sounded very familiar, although traditional songs like Go Away Little Girl sounded like e.g. Quite different, the “Silent Majority” on the ground floor was more than in the American skyscraper, like the Frog Serenade (“Kuty-kuruty”) or Schiffer’s Charleston, which the East Berlin Radio Dance Band interpreted at five in the morning. ‘Tea Hour’ from Radio Kossuth at the time.
I know the “other” America was chanting Bill Haley, Elvis, or Jerry Lee Lewis many years ago, I’m just trying to get the point across: Even in 1963, the ringing wasn’t self-evident.
No matter how many times we cried out in the spirit: Hey, hey, hey…
